I'm a father of three from Sydney, a Product Director and a Product Coach. I write about product management and run the Product Manager community.
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Product Strategy
Most product strategies are roadmaps in disguise.
A list of things the team plans to build, sorted by some combination of intuition and stakeholder pressure, wrapped in a mission statement nobody can recite without looking it up. Nobody calls it that. Everyone knows it is true.
Richard Rumelt calls the real thing a kernel. A diagnosis of the actual challenge, a guiding policy for how you'll address it, and coherent actions that reinforce each other rather than pull in opposite directions. Simple framework. Genuinely hard to execute, because it forces real choices rather than keeping options technically open.
Most organisations skip the diagnosis entirely. The guiding policy is implicit if it exists at all. The coherent actions are "the roadmap," and the roadmap was built by whoever had the most persistence in the last planning cycle. I've watched this happen with a specific kind of quiet. Nobody announces that the strategy has been abandoned. It just stops being mentioned.
The gap between understanding what good strategy looks like and actually running it through an organisation, connecting daily prioritisation calls to the thing the business most needs to win, that's where most of the interesting problems sit. And honestly, most of the failures too.
That's what the writing here is about.
Rumelt's core argument is that most "strategy" is a list of goals dressed up to sound strategic. The real version is narrower, harder and starts with an honest diagnosis of what you're actually up against. Notes from his Lenny's Podcast conversation.
The Purpose of a Strategy
What strategy is actually for, and why organisations keep mistaking plans and ambitions for direction.
Simple Strategy by Netflix
How Netflix runs strategy: short documents, specific choices, revisable when the world changes. The opposite of the 40-page deck nobody reads after the all-hands, which is more companies than will admit it.
Strategy: Practical Tips
Concrete ways to sharpen a strategy that's already in place, or diagnose one that isn't working.
The most practical tool for communicating strategy clearly, especially when the audience has ten minutes and you need them to grasp both the problem and the direction before they check their phones.
How to Craft a Strategy Narrative That Inspires Action
How to move from a strategy document to a story the team can actually hold. Once the slide deck stops being opened, the narrative is all that's left.
Clarity Over Complexity
Why clear strategy is harder to produce than complex strategy, and what to do when you can't get everyone to agree on the simple version.
The structural reasons most product managers never get near the strategic work, and why handing them a framework doesn't fix it.
Agile vs Strategy
How agile methodology and product strategy should work together, and how they actually work together in most teams. Spoiler: not well, most of the time.
Confusion Kills Strategy
What happens when the strategy is technically in place but nobody in the organisation understands it well enough to act on it.
What great CEOs understand about the relationship between strategy and operations that most product leaders don't, and how the strategy narrative connects the two.
Strategic Balance and Flow
How to keep a product organisation moving between exploration and execution without losing the strategic thread entirely.
A specific answer to a harder question: given what we know about our customers, our market and our constraints, what are we going to do, and what are we deliberately not doing? It's separate from a roadmap, which is a plan for execution, and from a vision, which is a long-horizon aspiration. A good strategy is short enough to remember and specific enough to make real decisions from. Most aren't, which is the whole problem.
What's the difference between a product strategy and a product roadmap?
A roadmap is a plan. The strategy is what justifies it, which most teams skip entirely, which is why every prioritisation conversation feels like it restarts from scratch. The strategy answers what problem you're solving, for whom and why this approach. The roadmap follows from that. Without the strategy, you're just sorting work by whoever argued loudest in the last planning session.
What makes a product strategy good?
Rumelt's test is useful here, more or less. A good strategy has a clear diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy that explains how you'll approach it, and coherent actions that reinforce each other rather than cancel each other out. It also makes clear what you're not doing. If the same strategy could apply to any company in your space, it's not specific enough to be useful yet.
How do you communicate product strategy to a team?
SCQA is the most practical tool for this. Start with the context everyone already understands, name the specific problem that needs solving, ask the question the strategy answers, then give the answer. Most strategy communication fails because it leads with the answer and skips the problem, so the team understands what to build but not why, which means the first time something changes they're stuck. The context is what makes direction portable.
How often should product strategy change?
More often than most organisations are comfortable with, and less often than most roadmaps do. The diagnosis and guiding policy should be stable enough for the team to actually internalise, usually quarters not weeks. The specific actions should be revisable as you learn. The mistake is either locking the strategy so long it becomes irrelevant, or changing direction so often there's no real strategy at all, just a new slide every quarter.
Why do most product strategies fail?
Usually for one of three reasons, though they often show up together. The strategy was never a real choice to begin with, just a mission statement with dates attached. Or it was never connected to what the team actually builds day to day. Or it was communicated once and assumed to be understood. Strategy isn't a document. It's a shared understanding of what you're doing and why, and maintaining that understanding is an active job, not something you sort out at an offsite and move on from.
No retainer. Just the work that needs doing.
A list of things the team plans to build, sorted by some combination of intuition and stakeholder pressure, wrapped in a mission statement nobody can recite without looking it up. Nobody calls it that. Everyone knows it is true.
Richard Rumelt calls the real thing a kernel. A diagnosis of the actual challenge, a guiding policy for how you'll address it, and coherent actions that reinforce each other rather than pull in opposite directions. Simple framework. Genuinely hard to execute, because it forces real choices rather than keeping options technically open.
Most organisations skip the diagnosis entirely. The guiding policy is implicit if it exists at all. The coherent actions are "the roadmap," and the roadmap was built by whoever had the most persistence in the last planning cycle. I've watched this happen with a specific kind of quiet. Nobody announces that the strategy has been abandoned. It just stops being mentioned.
The gap between understanding what good strategy looks like and actually running it through an organisation, connecting daily prioritisation calls to the thing the business most needs to win, that's where most of the interesting problems sit. And honestly, most of the failures too.
That's what the writing here is about.
Strategy foundations
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt's Kernel FrameworkRumelt's core argument is that most "strategy" is a list of goals dressed up to sound strategic. The real version is narrower, harder and starts with an honest diagnosis of what you're actually up against. Notes from his Lenny's Podcast conversation.
The Purpose of a Strategy
What strategy is actually for, and why organisations keep mistaking plans and ambitions for direction.
Simple Strategy by Netflix
How Netflix runs strategy: short documents, specific choices, revisable when the world changes. The opposite of the 40-page deck nobody reads after the all-hands, which is more companies than will admit it.
Strategy: Practical Tips
Concrete ways to sharpen a strategy that's already in place, or diagnose one that isn't working.
Communicating strategy
SCQA Framework: Situation, Complication, Question, AnswerThe most practical tool for communicating strategy clearly, especially when the audience has ten minutes and you need them to grasp both the problem and the direction before they check their phones.
How to Craft a Strategy Narrative That Inspires Action
How to move from a strategy document to a story the team can actually hold. Once the slide deck stops being opened, the narrative is all that's left.
Clarity Over Complexity
Why clear strategy is harder to produce than complex strategy, and what to do when you can't get everyone to agree on the simple version.
Strategy in practice
Why PMs Aren't Driving Strategy (And Why Workshops Won't Fix It)The structural reasons most product managers never get near the strategic work, and why handing them a framework doesn't fix it.
Agile vs Strategy
How agile methodology and product strategy should work together, and how they actually work together in most teams. Spoiler: not well, most of the time.
Confusion Kills Strategy
What happens when the strategy is technically in place but nobody in the organisation understands it well enough to act on it.
Strategy and leadership
The CEO Code: Strategy, Operations and Strategy NarrativeWhat great CEOs understand about the relationship between strategy and operations that most product leaders don't, and how the strategy narrative connects the two.
Strategic Balance and Flow
How to keep a product organisation moving between exploration and execution without losing the strategic thread entirely.
Frequently asked questions
What is a product strategy?A specific answer to a harder question: given what we know about our customers, our market and our constraints, what are we going to do, and what are we deliberately not doing? It's separate from a roadmap, which is a plan for execution, and from a vision, which is a long-horizon aspiration. A good strategy is short enough to remember and specific enough to make real decisions from. Most aren't, which is the whole problem.
What's the difference between a product strategy and a product roadmap?
A roadmap is a plan. The strategy is what justifies it, which most teams skip entirely, which is why every prioritisation conversation feels like it restarts from scratch. The strategy answers what problem you're solving, for whom and why this approach. The roadmap follows from that. Without the strategy, you're just sorting work by whoever argued loudest in the last planning session.
What makes a product strategy good?
Rumelt's test is useful here, more or less. A good strategy has a clear diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy that explains how you'll approach it, and coherent actions that reinforce each other rather than cancel each other out. It also makes clear what you're not doing. If the same strategy could apply to any company in your space, it's not specific enough to be useful yet.
How do you communicate product strategy to a team?
SCQA is the most practical tool for this. Start with the context everyone already understands, name the specific problem that needs solving, ask the question the strategy answers, then give the answer. Most strategy communication fails because it leads with the answer and skips the problem, so the team understands what to build but not why, which means the first time something changes they're stuck. The context is what makes direction portable.
How often should product strategy change?
More often than most organisations are comfortable with, and less often than most roadmaps do. The diagnosis and guiding policy should be stable enough for the team to actually internalise, usually quarters not weeks. The specific actions should be revisable as you learn. The mistake is either locking the strategy so long it becomes irrelevant, or changing direction so often there's no real strategy at all, just a new slide every quarter.
Why do most product strategies fail?
Usually for one of three reasons, though they often show up together. The strategy was never a real choice to begin with, just a mission statement with dates attached. Or it was never connected to what the team actually builds day to day. Or it was communicated once and assumed to be understood. Strategy isn't a document. It's a shared understanding of what you're doing and why, and maintaining that understanding is an active job, not something you sort out at an offsite and move on from.
Work with me
If your product team has a strategy problem, whether that's getting one in place, making sure it connects to what the team builds day to day, or helping a founder think through a direction, I run focused engagements for exactly that.No retainer. Just the work that needs doing.
